


the lick of beginning

by dissembler



Series: pedagogy [1]
Category: Peter Pan (2003), Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Classical References, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dubious Consent, Dubiously Consensual Hand Jobs, General Creepiness, M/M, Power Dynamics, Sexual Inexperience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:33:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24220624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: Hook returns from London to a silent ship and an angered Pan.
Relationships: James Hook/Peter Pan
Series: pedagogy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2173335
Comments: 4
Kudos: 91





	the lick of beginning

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS:
> 
> I've not tagged this underage because it's arguable that an immortal boy can be given an age? Bodily though he's like 14 so, proceed with caution. I've put this in Peter Pan (2003) because that's the visual I was working from for Pan's outfit.
> 
> Consent: Pan is fronting that he's touched himself/been touched by others before, he's lying. He does not know enough about what's being done to him to really consent to it but, out of one-upmanship and pride, he is not fighting it.

Pan waits for him, as he hauls himself up onto the deck. It’s a rare showing of good form from the boy, but James can tell he has not yet wholly accepted the virtue of patience. His body seems to shake with the need to ask, and sure enough he demands an answer the moment James’ footing is sure: “Where did you go?”

His ship is eerily quiet, not a man in sight save Pan, who is not a man. James ignores his question, poses one of his own: “What have you done with my crew?” They would not just have abandoned their posts, if they have he’ll tan their hides. 

Hovering in the air above the cargo hatch, the boy puffs up his chest. His hands are on his hips, one hand holding a cutlass, one arm roughly bandaged with material of a scarlet that’s too rich and too bright to be bloodstained. James fancies that he’ll find his wardrobe sacked when at last he returns to his cabin after whatever happens here; he hopes only one of his fine coats has been shredded, but all the same he feels his lip curl, imagining Pan taking out his impotent rage on his clothes: his boy’s hands tearing at the brocade, holding it fiercely and stabbing at it with his stone-sharpened knife. 

“I slaughtered them,” Pan answers, crowing, landing gently on the forecastle. “Every one.”

There is not enough blood on this deck for that, not enough wounds on Pan; his crew may not be elite, but they are vicious; they’d have fought to the death if death was what faced them. “I take leave to doubt that,” he says serenely. Nothing infuriates Peter Pan like an outright dismissal.

“You cannot take that leave,” the boy says, walking rather than flying to face James from the top of the stair. “I do not grant you the leave to do so.”

James’ smile bares teeth now. “I did not ask for your leave, boy. I have no need of asking, I took it.”

Pan rushes at him, a vicious swooping bird, and James dives to the right. He is in no mood to lose an eye; he needs them both to track Pan’s flight as he flies around the stern of the ship, coming to a stop just above the port railing, directly opposite James. He is glowering, patches of colour on his cheeks; he shakes with rage.

“Where did you go?” he shouts. “And why?”

James favours him with a theatrical shrug. “Away, Pan,” he says. “I have other concerns than you.”

Gratifyingly predictable, Pan’s face in the light of those words is a picture: his mouth falls open, eyes widening, then narrowing to slits, and he loses some of his safe distance from the ground before he rallies, lifting six feet or so into the air and shifting his sword in his hand. He fixes James with a look that might send one of his crew reeling, might inspire the panic of his namesake, but James has already latched onto that slight faltering, the missed beat of a wing that had dropped the bird closer to the gun before Pan had caught himself.

“Liar,” Pan shouts down, “I know why you were gone.”

“Oh yes?” James wets his lips. “And why was that?”

Pan’s eyes and his blade glint in the sun. “Banished!”

“And who could banish me?

“I.” Pan laughs, sure that he is right. Already he has begun to forget his fury at being ignored, has rewritten events in his favour.

James is not inclined to let that be so. “A mere boy cannot banish me.”

Yelling, Pan dives for him, but by now James knows well enough how little space there is for strategy in Pan’s mind once he is angry: he catches him easily with a hand slapped around his wounded arm. 

James slides his hand down, dragging the make-shift bandage with it and away, to Pan’s thin wrist and twists, and when Pan yelps in pain and his sword clatters to the floor, James uses his shock to pull him around and pin him, James’ chest at his front and the rail at his back, against the wood. Pan’s spine bows backward; desperately he tries to get away, his feet dangling above the deck, and in his pained face his eyes are wide. James digs his hook into the rail so as not to dig it into Pan; he is not so considerate with his hand, returning it to Pan’s wound and squeezing.

“Let me go!” Pan twists against him, writhing and kicking, but James presses forward, sliding his own thigh between the boy’s legs, robbing him of range enough to hurt. Pan’s head falls back, his throat bared, and James wants to push his fingers into that grubby blond hair, pull him close and breathe in the scent of forest floor. 

That would mean letting go and he cannot do that. The flurry of Pan’s pulse is rabbit quick through the damp, bloodied skin of his arm under James’ palm. He tries again to free himself, arching up with all his might and failing, like the waves breaking against the hull of the ship. Seeing his cause is lost he shudders, the movement bringing something new to light as James looks down: beneath his scant, leaf-sewn clothing Pan is hard, his prick a rigid line against his belly.

James must relax his grip a little for the next thing he knows is Pan, wrenching himself free and tearing away. He himself turns slowly, leaning easily where Pan was just pinned. 

Pan pants in the air, still above the ship, his expression torn.

“Don’t be a martyr, Pan,” James purrs. “You’re dying to ask me.”

“You don’t know anything.” Pan is shaking his head, his eyes darting around the deck, the sea beyond the ship, unwilling to focus on James. “ _You_ can’t tell me anything. _I_ understand everything.”

“Do you?” James asks, and this time they rush each other at the same time, and, still shaking in the light of all he does not know, Pan is easier still to best. James has him against the mast as quick as blinking, keeping him there with his hook-arm across the boy’s chest and his wide hand low on the boy’s stomach. 

Working his thigh back between Pan’s legs, James lowers his voice to taunt him. “Then you’ll know what to expect when I touch you here,” he says, drawing his hand down beneath the leaves that cover Pan’s modesty, his fingertips barely brushing the velvet hardness there. “None of this is new to you.”

At a flex of James’ fingers Pan whines, his hips pushing up from the mast to chase the touch. His lower lip is wet and white between his teeth, his hands clutching the thick rope behind him. 

“I know–” James drums his fingers, feeling the soft, downy skin, and Pan half flinches away, his cock jumps – “Ah! I know…”

James strokes him idly, his fingers slightly wet from the leaking tip, feeling the throb of Pan’s need and doing nothing for it. “So then, I am not the first to touch you.” 

He holds Pan back, whining and squirming, and gazes on him, takes in his cheeks flushed with shame and exertion, the colour travelling down to become patchy on his chest, pink against the scarlet of James’ sleeve. His body, in all its lithe strength, its youthful beauty, is ripped from the images in the books he had learnt by heart at Eton: when he flies and fights he is Dionysus, wild and free, but trapped here he is as Ganymede, with James’ body the eagle’s claws. Reminiscences of school do not stop at such analogies: James remembers boys beneath him, not so young as to be all one thing, like Pan the planes of their bodies a marriage of soft flesh and building muscle. But it is with these boys that Pan diverges from the tracks of memory, providing something new. The boys at school had spread out, willing and pliant, tangling their fingers in his dark hair as he slid between their oiled thighs. Pan – and who knows if Ganymede fought so – writhes.

“No,” Pan says around a hitching breath, “I… I have–” he breaks off with a sob as James, tired of the boy’s insistence of experience he does not have, finally gathers the seed Pan has leaked onto his sword-callused palm and takes him in hand, frigging him once, twice, then stopping abruptly.

Pan howls, throwing his head back against the rope-slung mast. The muscles in his arms are taut with strain, his grasping hands white-knuckled; he looks as though he is fighting the instinct to reach for James. His chest heaves, the one nipple James can see is stiff, a dusky rose, and James curses him for cutting off his hand and leaving him without the means to frig and pinch at once. James could lean down and bite, and he does not think that Pan, his hips lifting in desperation, would object.

“Please,” Pan moans, and looks mortified. 

“Say it, Pan,” James says, his own pulse loud in his ears, lagging behind the racing of Pan’s. He is always slower, he thinks, let Pan see now the strength there is in that. He grazes Pan’s prick again, a feather touch, to pull another agonized sound from behind his lips. Pan pulls his legs up, attempting to curl into a ball; he has forgotten weightlessness, his thighs quake with the effort of holding them up. “Admit it.”

Sudden as a snake, one of Pan’s hands shoots forward and he grabs James’ wrist, pushing his hand lower. “You can’t…” he whimpers, his nails digging into James’ skin, leaving crescent shaped welts that spell out his need. “I know… _Please_.”

Never so uncouth as to roll his eyes, James says, “Of course you do,” as he grips Pan hard, tugging roughly up from the base. He twists his wrist viciously at the last and Pan spurts in ropes over his hand, throwing his head to the side with a broken wail. James tuts, “So quickly…” but strokes him through it almost gently.

When it is done, James leans back to survey him, his body twitching and shuddering in the wake of his crisis. James withdraws his hand, glistening with Pan’s spend, and smears the bare skin of Pan’s stomach with it, feeling the flesh jump under his touch. He smiles, and grips Pan’s chin, forcing him to look at him.

Meeting his eyes, Pan’s widen in horror, and with strength summoned from God knows where he kicks off from the mast, breaking James’ grip so carelessly that his hook slashes through the meat of the boy’s shoulder. He runs, tripping over his feet, to port and flings himself into the air, soaring away with no parting words but a horrified look over his shoulder. 

“You’ll be back!” James cries at his shrinking form: like Pandora, the boy will not be able to resist. 

As he heads for the brig, James brings his bloodied hook up to his face, inspects it. The eyes reflected back at him are red with simmering intent.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Anne Carson's Bakkhai.


End file.
